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The graphics editor I use is Ultimate Paint. It is a very powerful editor with many features, including the ability to write your own filters in programming code. It is inexpensive shareware and is also available in a freeware version.
In a day and age where many people think it too much work to do anything other than rastering out a single line of pixels to the laserprinter, and then, as needs be, repeat it, row by row, until the picture is printed, it might go past some people - the ones that only have Windows - that there are still some people out there who sit around loading 'softfonts' into their memory, and then, after exporting those fonts to a laserprinter, find it convenient to juggle them around with no more than a short ESC sequence to effect an overall change in printout. (It sure beats having to reload 64K of bytes every time you want to switch from italic to upright, or from plain to bold, or large to small, including subscripts and superscript, just to print out a document of medium complexity.) Back in the olden days, laserprinters tended to have just enough room for a few dozen softfonts, and the only way to get them in, was by sending ESC codes to the laserprinter, almost always with a preliminary 'printer reset' code consisting of two bytes: 1b 45 - so I was wondering if you had any tips on how to modify my laserfonts from the olden days for use with Windows? Of course, things are more complicated than snipping off two bytes. It turns out that there are hosts of other ESC sequences that need to be fixed up, or turned around. Like whether a font is proportional or fixed, upright or italic, that sort of thing.
Strip off HP laserprinter headers? Sorry, no idea on that one--not even sure I understand the question. Maybe someone else knows.
Thanks! I'll give that a shot. Say, can you suggest a way for me to strip off the HP laserprinter headers to arrive at a Windows compatible font of some kind? Most HP laserprinter fonts predating the HP3 series were similar to .BMP fonts, and as such were non-scalable.
'most chess pieces are symmetrical along a vertical axis, and I simply haven't the slightest idea how to do it with the software that comes with Windows.' In MS Paint, make sure you uncheck the option 'Draw Opaque' under 'Image', and then draw the left- or right-half of your image. Leave the rest of the image white. Then select all, copy, and while the copy is selected, choose Image / Flip-Rotate / Horizontal. That will flip the 'copy' to its own mirror-image. Then you can adjust its position with the mouse to line up with the other half.
Black and white seems particularly appropriate to graphics for chess programs. What graphics editor did you use for the Macintosh?
Well, shoot, I'm not at all familiar with Windows. I just haven't had much luck with it. Using the Microsoft 'paint' program, how on earth would you get your images cut down the middle so the left side can be reflected over to the right side? For instance, most chess pieces are symmetrical along a vertical axis, and I simply haven't the slightest idea how to do it with the software that comes with Windows.
Mike Howe, Can you suggest a good, inexpensive JPEG, GIF, or PNG editor for either Windows or DOS? Although the graphics available here at www.chessvariants.org is suitable for the purpose at hand, I'm tempted to try my hand at changing some of the graphics around. What programs do you use? Unfortunately, my Windows computer crashes a lot. That means working on an ordinary 68000 system (plain vanilla ST, 2.5 megs, but at least it's stable) or a PC that runs DOS. Sigh. If only my HP laserfonts from the olden days could be modified for use on Internet, or changed around so they could be imported into Windows - but it seems like 99 out of 100 PC users have never even HEARD of laser font ID codes, or font management ESC sequences, it's hopeless to even broach the subject, and have them understand what I am talking about.) If you remember seeing my fonts from 1988, they were actually pretty good for 300 dpi laserprinter graphics.
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